ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, do we need to kill badgers to save cows? Well the government thinks we do and it plans to kill up to 5000 badgers over the coming months. They’re doing it to try to tackle of course bovine tuberculosis, a disease in cattle that can be spread, it’s thought, by badgers. Well I’m joined now by the Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment and Rural Affairs, Mary Creagh. Can I ask you very quickly first of all about this issue of lobbying, it’s reared its head yet again with these Lords accused of wrongdoing and we’ve just heard that Lord Laird has resigned the Unionist party whip. It seems to be something that bedevilled the Labour years when they were in government and it seems to be something, lobbying, that we can’t get sorted.

MARY CREAGH: Absolutely. Labour has a very clear code of conduct for peers and for MPs, for all parliamentarians and if there is any genuine evidence of wrongdoing we won’t hesitate to set up an inquiry into that but as an MP who works hard, gives up Sunday morning to come and talk to you, Dermot, I find it very depressing because it’s very bad for parliament, it labels all of us with the same brush, makes it look like we are out for our own interests and actually it does democracy no favours at all. What we really need is for the government to pulls its finger out and get its register of lobbyists up and running which is what they said they would do when they came into power.

DM: Okay, let’s move on to the badger cull, pilot cull about to begin. You have said in opposition that, quote, a cull would be bad for badgers, farmers and taxpayers. I think we can work out that a cull would bad for badgers but what about farmers and taxpayers? Many farmers say they want to see this.

MC: That’s true, farmers do want to see this and bovine TB is an absolutely devastating disease but the farmer led cull, the free shooting of badgers has never actually been tried. The government culls that we carried out when we were in government were cage trapping and shooting the badgers so this is a completely untested, very risky scheme and of course let not forget for the taxpayer, the cost of policing the culls actually will be £4 million in these two pilot areas over those four years, that’s an awful lot of money and we think that money would be better spent vaccinating badgers.

DM: Okay, just tell us why it’s risky though, why do you think it has dangers?

MC: Because culling badgers in the first two years of a cull, Labour’s culls showed, that you increase the badgers move out of an area because they are displaced by the shooting so you increase the amount of badgers that are infected and you increase the proportion of badgers that actually suffer from bovine TB. If you vaccinate the badgers you don’t have to pay the cost of policing and you reduce the viral load in those infected badgers.

DM: But what are the cost implications? You have to trap the badgers to vaccinate them.

MC: You do have to trap them, yes but you of course don’t have to pay the cost of policing and that is what’s shaping up to be the biggest expense for the taxpayer in all of this.

DM: So you think the government, you said that Labour carried out similar experiments and the data is there, it’s clear, it failed?

MC: The data is clear, it reduces bovine TB by 16% over nine years, that is not the silver bullet to get rid of bovine TB. All it does is reduce the trend rate of increase, it doesn’t stop it and it doesn’t reduce it. We need to do much, much more if we are going to get rid of TB in this country.

DM: I asked you there about the costs because you said it would be bad for taxpayers, why would it be bad for taxpayers?

MC: We’ve already spent as taxpayers over a million pounds on setting up a scientific group to oversee these culls, on training marksmen, on licencing and of course it is actually quite difficult to shoot a badger, they are very low slung animals, they only come out at night and they have to be shot cleanly and humanely and there is no evidence as yet that that can be done by marksmen in the night, potentially with public protests going on around them.

DM: Now another area you cover which has cost implications is the horsemeat scandal and it seems, obviously if we had had testing before it all broke we might have had some awareness of it but that hasn’t happened we found out, the Food Standards Agency wasn’t able to do that because of cost.

MC: Well the area of compositional policy, the government changed the Food Standards Agency’s structure in 2010 and took food policy and composition back in house to DEFRA. The Food Standards Agency board is meeting on Tuesday and saying actually we need to look again at how we have rapid alerts to warn consumers when things are being adulterated and there hasn’t been a single adulteration survey carried out in the last three years under this government. We just don’t think that’s right, we need to make sure that consumers are protected.

DM: So what are you saying, it could still be going on out there or something else, something else we don’t know about because the testing is just not taking place?

MC: Well you can look on the Food Standards Agency website, there is evidence that people are being sold haddock instead of cod, plaice instead of haddock, cheaper fish instead of the more expensive fish in fish and chip shops, cheaper olive oil being passed off as extra virgin olive oil, there was a bit of a hoo-hah about the EU trying to do bottles and things on that. It is obviously much more important if you are an Italian than if you’re a Brit but we wouldn’t accept for example buying a bottle of wine and it being adulterated and filled with something cheaper when we think we’re getting a premium bottle so there is a lot of adulteration going on out there, I think the whole of the EU needs to look at how it works but we have got to be realistic. It is Trading Standards Officers working through councils on the ground that find this stuff out, that listen to people’s concerns and actually raise their concerns with the FSA. The government has basically got rid of 700 Trading Standards Officers over the last three years so our ability to track and detect this type of consumer fraud on the ground has massively reduced over the last three years.

DM: Lastly, can I just ask you about your leader, Ed Miliband. Of course you voted for this brother, didn’t you, in the leadership election. It’s been said and this survey is telling us, the survey that came out last week saying that by and large the public think that Mr Brown did a better job than Ed Miliband. People out here like you batting for Labour, getting the policy out there, we are not hearing too much from Ed Miliband, do you think he is being relatively ineffective at the moment?

MC: I see Ed Miliband every week, we have Shadow Cabinet tomorrow, Ed is doing a great job as leader. We are working very hard on the policy review and I think you’ll see a couple of speeches this week talking about the environment in which we will be looking at our spending plans coming up to the comprehensive spending review. I think Ed’s out there whether it’s soapboxes during the local elections, whether it’s meeting local people, working hard in Doncaster for that mayoral election which Labour very narrowly won, so he is doing a great job and we hope, we aspire to be the next government.

DM: Indeed. Mary Creagh, thank you very much indeed, thank you for your time there.